Ep 130 | How to avoid FASFA paperwork pitfalls

SPEAKER_02 0:00

It's not a one and done thing. I think Angelica more than I, because she works so much with people in our community and our students. She sees people that come year after year. I love seeing people come year after year. And in fact, we've worked with people that have brought their family members that have brought people close to them. And because they're there and they see how easy it is to do, they do it too. And they don't realize they can get we've seen people get thousands of dollars to go to school when they didn't even know they could get the opportunity and they weren't even planning to do it.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support every student's success. Sometimes it seems like adulthood can be summed up as deadlines and due dates. It can feel even more overwhelming once college is on the horizon and free tuition money is at stake. Thankfully, you don't have to navigate these things alone. FASFA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and completing this form helps you learn if your child is eligible for grants, scholarships, work study programs, or loans for college or career school. My next guests are the Associate Vice President of Institutional Research and Enterprise and the Assistant Director of Financial Aid at Pensacola State College. Today they're going to help us avoid paperwork pitfalls when it comes to completing your child's FAFSA forms and answer some specific questions, keeping an eye on the details and simplifying the process. Michael Johnston and Angelica Koontz, thanks for being here, guys.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Yes, thank you for having us. So, Michael, I want to start with you. Why is it important for students to complete their FAFSA forms?

SPEAKER_02 1:55

Okay, so I wish I could just bestow upon everyone the natural ability to just complete it every year, regardless if you're going to school. Maybe you're thinking about going to school, maybe you are in school. People can complete it because there's no cost to complete it. And all it does is open up opportunities for you. And if you know that the worst thing that someone can ever say to you is no, at least you gave it a shot. There's work positions that open up for you, plus there's so many scholarship opportunities that open up just because you completed it, not because you received an award, but just organizations want to know that you took that extra step to see if there was extra money out there. So there's so many benefits to completing that FAFSA. And the nice part about our local area is that we have resources to help you, which is so different than it was historically.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

And you said, I wish they would fill it out every year. Well, I I thought this was like a one and done thing.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

It's not a one and done thing. I think Angelica more than I, because she works so much with people in our community and our students, she sees people that come year after year. I love seeing people come year after year. And in fact, we've worked with people that have brought their family members that have brought people close to them. And because they're there and they see how easy it is to do, they do it too, and they don't realize they can get we've seen people get thousands of dollars to go to school when they didn't even know they could get the opportunity and they weren't even planning to do it.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

And it's resources that would only be discovered upon completion of the FAFSA. That's what's so interesting to me because I you know, I think maybe it's a common misconception, Angelica. You can tell me if I'm wrong or not, but maybe it's a common misconception that maybe you'll figure this out in another way, because after all, we have Google now.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

So there is definitely some misconceptions along with filling out the FAFSA. A lot of parents will say, Well, my kid's not going to qualify for anything. I'm not even going to bother filling it out. But by them filling it out, they end up discovering that there's grants that don't actually look at need-based all the time. And then there's other scholarships that do require that FAFSA. So a lot of state scholarships require the FAFSA completion. So they're missing out on those funds just by not filling out the FAFSA. So it's kind of something that it's like, even if you feel you won't qualify for it, go ahead and fill it out. Because a lot of students don't think about work study opportunities. A lot of students, when they think about the FAFSA, they only consider the Pell grant. That is a need-based grant. So yes, that student aid index calculation is important. But work studies, subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans, those are all opportunities and resources available to students if they would complete the FAFSA. And I know there's a lot of stigma surrounding student loans. As long as you take your time to research, make a budget and plan, taking out student loans is not the end of the world. And in fact, it can often help you build your credit.

SPEAKER_02 4:58

So I appreciated my student loan opportunities.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Do you find that people think that FAFSA is just a way to push a student loan onto a family?

SPEAKER_00 5:08

No, because whenever you complete the FAFSA, that is not obligating you to borrow that student loan. In fact, at Penn School Estate College, we do have our students, they had to submit a separate request to receive loans at Penn School Estate College. Not all colleges do that. They expect you to kind of read your total financial aid offer and make decisions accordingly. For us at PSC, we want to make sure that our students are aware we actually have a student loan guide that kind of explains the different types of loans. There's two types of loans, subsidized versus unsubsidized. And we try to make sure that everyone is educated as far as the differences between the two types of loans.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Okay. So the other thing I wanted to ask you about is our completion rates in Escambia County, because okay, we got thousands of dollars out there and millions. Millions of dollars out there, all these opportunities that are waiting to be unlocked. But in Escambia County families, we know from we've interviewed some other people that explain we have a lot of Alice families, which is an acronym that basically means that you're working really hard to make those ends meet. But if there's any extra or an emergency, you're really in a tough spot. Yet you also don't qualify for a lot of, you know, generalized aid. So you would think in a community that has like a really high percentage of those kinds of families, that we would also have a really high percentage of completion rates, but that's not the case.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

So Mike may be able to speak to this a little bit more than me, but I do know that there are a lot of community outreach resources that are making those outreaches. I know personally at Pensacola State College, we are going directly to high schools in order to help high school students complete their FAFSA. So I do believe that it is on the rate, like on the increase now, but I believe that Mike would be able to provide more classes.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

We work a lot in the capacity of understanding our community and understanding the data and understanding our population. And you you are correct. You would expect with populations that have different types of situational circumstances with families, whether they're children on free or reduced lunch, whether they're receiving some financial opportunities from our state, that you would expect those would walk hand in hand with an increased FAFSA, right? But often, if people do not know about the resources that are available to them, they just end up not being able to use those resources. So a big part of what we're working with in the more community aspect through our local college access network, our local LCAN through Achiva Scambia, through a lot of organizations. I try to get involved in the more global Scambia County, Santa Rosa County aspect to say that these are the resources we have available. We recognize that maybe you come from a single parent family, maybe you don't know how to get in contact with parent number two because you haven't seen them in a while. Maybe you're living with your grandparents because your parents are working night and day or they're just not accessible. We want to find the resources to help that individual get to that next stage in their life. So that's why for us, when we see those differences and disparities in FAFSA completion in our local county versus our county adjacent to us in Santa Rosa County, we even see very large differences in our local high schools. We see that some high schools are in the 80, 90 percentile of completing their FAFSAs at their senior year, and then we see others that are not. How can we help bridge those gaps?

SPEAKER_01 8:26

And thankfully the process has been simplified a little bit uh recently. So, how would you say, Michael, that the process has been upgraded, we'll say, since the early 2000s?

SPEAKER_02 8:36

Okay, so that's uh well, I appreciate because I can actually lend perspective because I did the FAFSA in the 2000s. My parents did the FAFSA in 2000. So I when I went to college, I was um one that uh had a family that completed the FAFSA, but I was first generation. My parents didn't go to college, they went to a more tripical trade school. And because we were so unfamiliar with it, we actually my parents hired an accountant to help us, but the accountant wasn't specialized in the FAFSA. So the first year I got some awards that were fantastic and helped me go to school. But then the second year I got a request to validate and they had to submit some additional paperwork. And because my parents didn't submit taxes at the time that we have to, they got extensions because of their different tax structure. I lost those awards.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

So I was one that started with some awards and then I lost some because my family was just unaware.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

But no, did you have to pay those monies back?

SPEAKER_02 9:24

No, uh, not the first year. I didn't have to pay them back, but the second year I just didn't get them. So the monies that I thought I was gonna have because it was part of my financial package. When they went in and said, hey, we need additional support documentation. My parents didn't have it because they had not finished their taxes and we just didn't have the same resources that some of my colleagues had, some of my fellow students had. So I was okay. I learned a lot. I learned how to work a little bit more, and I knew that I wanted to survive and I wanted to do better, and I found additional scholarships. I worked with my advisors and I was able to stay and I graduated, and I'm very fortunate for it. But then I also appreciate that experience because I was someone that in 2000 had a FAFSA that was on paper, which is different than it is now in Jellica. Actually, I just did the FAFSA myself last week.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Okay, how'd that go?

SPEAKER_02 10:07

So I did it, I did it in all about uh 45 minutes on a computer or on your phone. I did it on a laptop because I was like, I want to, you know, I always want to feel the experience, I want to understand it. So the best way it is for me is just to do it myself and to try to figure it out and see if I could understand the complexities that could be potentially associated with it. So that way if I'm in the community and I'm helping someone or I'm working with Angelica and she's driving success in our local area with FAFSA, I can help step in and say that I've done it too.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Yeah, yeah. So it used to be paper and now it's digital. So Mazel Tow for that.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

There's also been other changes to the digital version. So I actually went to college around 2013. I graduated high school in 2013. So I guess it was 2014 when I first officially started college. But I had to go in and manually enter my parents' TATS information.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

So, like line by line, answer the questions with the right number, or else you would have a similar fate as our friend Mike over here.

SPEAKER_02 11:05

That's what happened.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Yes. There is a process called verification. If that information does not match the documentation, us as financial aid administrators, we had to go in and update it. So there have been issues where someone has accidentally mistyped in a number. So they thought they were getting a certain amount and then they got selected for verification. So we had to review the documentation. We found the error, we had to go in and correct it, and then they ended up not being eligible for financial aid.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Can you imagine the emotions? Like college is so emotional for all parties involved. Think about as a parent, your little duckling is going off to university. Thinking about as a student, you're like excited but terrified at the same time. You're trying to act like you know things so that your mom or dad don't, you know, become overbearing and helicopter parent you, but you really don't know a lot. And so you feel in this very liminal space of like, I'm not an adult, but I'm not a kid. And then you push on top of that this, and if you don't do this paperwork right, you will be bartending, which is what Mike did. That's actually what I did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

So I did it. And they use a lot of acronyms too. There's a lot of fancy terms that you don't have in high school. Yeah. You know, in college, we have professors, we don't traditionally have teachers. We don't have classrooms, we have lecture halls. So we add all those different terms to it and all these different types of paperwork and scholarship opportunities versus grants, and it can add to a lot of the stress for an individual that's trying to go to college. But that's why we have these resources that are available that are so different. Because I don't know if they existed when I was going to college, Meredith, but they're here now.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Which is why we're here at this moment, thankfully.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

They are free. You don't have to, if if people walk in and they meet with Angelica or any of her team members, if they meet with our trio department, we we can help people at no cost to them. That's our job to help people maximize their resources at no expense. So where my family had to hire an accountant because they just didn't know and they didn't know the difference between line 9A and line 11C and how that implicated the the FAFSA form. This now has a resource that people that have been trained in this that work with it every day that knows the ins and the outs, what not to check if you're not sure, what happens if you don't have your social? These are the questions and the tough circumstances too. The stuff that people often are worrisome about talking about because they don't want to expose very painful or circumstantial situations about themselves. It's intimate. It is. You're exposing, you're you're letting your internal everything about you to someone that you maybe just met. And that's a that's a tough situation for a lot of people, but that's why they've been trained and they train all the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

So now you don't have to enter line by line. Now, now what do you do?

SPEAKER_00 13:41

So now the recommended process that I personally recommend, and it has seemed to be assessed pretty well among the other universities local as well, is I tell my students and my parents to make sure that they've created their FSA ID account at least three days before they go in and actually complete the FAFSA. The reason why is because now individuals have to create an FSA ID account with their social security number and their personal identifiable information, meaning their date of birth, email address, and address. Once they create that, that information is sent to the Social Security and Administration for verification. Once that information is verified, they can then log into the FAFSA application and complete it. Instead of them having to, so when I went to high school, at first I had to manually enter the TATS information. Then they changed it to where I could go to the IRS website and actually have them import the information in. Now parents and students have to provide consent for the IRS to provide the TATS information to the Department of Education. So that takes out all of that manual entering. But when students don't wait the three days, they are prompted to manually enter the information. That has been my personal experience working with students. That's when we found the most errors this past 24-25 award year. So then again, we have to go in, correct. Someone thought they were eligible for Pell Grant. Come to find out they misentered something in wrong, they weren't eligible at all. So going back to that whole emotional side of things, you have to kind of be like, okay, well, you have to ask inquisitive questions. So I always tell my students, keep in mind, I am a resource to you. I want to help you. I need to know information in order so I can help you. Because sometimes it'll be, okay, yeah, they made a great amount of money in the TAT year 2022. But their parent became unemployed or they had a loss, one of their parents passed away. If they don't share that information with us, we can't advise them to do what we call a professional judgment. Um, that allows us to go and update their information to where they could potentially become Pell eligible. We base it on their current circumstances. But by those students not coming to us and telling us their situations, we can't fix it. Mike, you mentioned earlier a student that is living with their grandparents. Well, a lot of students don't want to tell us my parents incarcerated, my parents in rehab. They don't want to tell us those intimate. Yes, very intimate.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Well, this is really good information because we're kind of setting, you know, your office up for people to connect with you and not do it alone and get the support that they need. But it is important to know the kinds of questions that will be a part of that discussion because you don't really put yourself in that mindset when you go into the Pentacola State College office. So a couple questions that are just sort of technical because I don't want to skip them. Can it be filled out using a phone?

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

I do not recommend it trying to navigate those little buttons because when you provide consent, I will say they love to have you extra check those buttons. You have to check it again and again and again. You press continue a lot. You can do it, but it's not the easiest on the eyes. I personally recommend a laptop or a desktop just because it's easier to read. There are a lot of disclosures in that FAFSA application. So I personally recommend doing it on a laptop or a desktop. But if you want to do it on your phone, you can. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

And then second question in that same technical thread is when should parents and students be filling this out?

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Like how early is too early? As soon as that application opens, that is when I tell all of my students to fill it out. But I mean what age? So I recommend seniors in high school. Okay. The FAFSA application opens October 1st. That was recently signed into legislation. So we're excited about that because the past few years it's been delayed until December.

SPEAKER_02 18:21

So they redid it. And so with the redoing of the technology and the formatting of it, they had a delay when it opened. But now they said they're going to guarantee every year the FAFSA for the upcoming October.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

So October 1st.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

October 1st. Thank you, Angelica.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

Okay. So that's good. And then how late is too late to fill out the forms? Like are you too when are you too old?

SPEAKER_02 18:42

No, so no one's ever too old. No one's ever too much.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

As long as you're going to college or a trade school.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

We actually have a student right now, he's 74 years old. No, are you serious? Yes, I'm very serious. That's so cool. And he completed his FAFSA. He was in the military. He was working traditionally some lower-skilled jobs, and he now realized that he's capable of going to college. He actually used one of our team members that Angelica supports, and he does FAFSA. He's got two state grants, and we gave him a scholarship at PSC. So you're never too old.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 19:08

So and even if you're not knowing that you're going to go to college, doing it might open up an opportunity. I worked with a young lady who was working for Uber, and she's still working for Uber, and she came in because she brought someone via Uber to our department to help phone their first time. No way. This is the best story.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

I did not expect y'all to have such good stories.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Oh, because the stories that Angelica sees the stories day in and day out. I get them when I'm fortunate enough to be around. But she brought in her client as a Uber that was coming to campus to get help. And so she did her FAFSA and she didn't understand what the SAI was, so we explained it. And then she's like, How? She's like, is this the amount of money I get? And it was um uh 7,400. Uh what's the max power word?

SPEAKER_00 19:49

7,395. She got she got to have that information top of mind.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

It comes immediately. Wow. So she says that if I go to school, do I would I qualify for this? And I was like, if you're full-time and we can pay for your books, and that's just the minimum. That's not additional scholarships and grants that we can look at afterwards. And there's other opportunities too by filling it out early that you can qualify. There's state grants that are on a first come, first served basis. So the earlier that you do it, the better the chances are of receiving even more money, money just to live off of, money to live.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

And you said full time.

SPEAKER_00 20:19

So is this only for full-time students? No, but the Pell Grant amount does get parated down per how many credit hours you attend. Used to, actually, this is another thing that has just recently changed. Used to, we had less than halftime, halftime, three-quarter time, and full time. We had those statuses. And then based on whichever status you were, that's how much you were able to receive. Now they've made it to where the Pell Grant pays based on how many credit hours you are actually in. So if you're in one credit hour, you can get a Pell Grant amount for that one credit hour. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

If you're taking one of our one credit courses and it's maybe a research course or an internet communication type course, or if you're taking a one credit lab because you're looking to go get to PA school or nursing school or if it's a medical school, we can now provide support for that.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

I had no idea. So this really applies not just to the students, but to the parents going back to school or maybe upgrading their certs. Okay, I know we're running out of time, which is a shame because we have so many more questions, but I just want to address at least one specific scenario that you're familiar with that's actually more common than people would think. And that would be with one parent being incarcerated. So how does that work? Because, you know, with the FASFA forms, you usually need info from both of the biological parents, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:40

Actually, you don't need information from both of the biological parents if they are not married. If one parent provides 51% of the financial support, that is the parent that is provided. So if that incarcerated parent is not the one that's providing the financial support, you don't really run into an issue. What you run into an issue with the incarceration is typically if both parents are incarcerated, or if the one parent is incarcerated and then the other parent has deceased. In which case there is a question on the FAFSA, in which they say other extenuating circumstances prohibits me from providing parental information, and that's going to make them be designated as a provisionally independent student, in which case they do need to reach out to their financial aid office so that way they can talk to us and explain to us what's going on. We oftentimes will need documentation, so just you know, an inmate record, we could take that. And then if the other parent has deceased, they can provide us that death certificate. And then what we can do is we can go in and say, okay, yes, they are independent and do something called a dependency override to where they don't have to actually provide the parents information.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

It's so nice to know that's not an automatic game over, you know, for someone who's maybe coming from a family situation where that is a dynamic. Maybe it matters even more to them to complete their education and maybe that's a cycle in their family and they want to break it. You know, everyone's so different. So I'm just making this up. But I'm putting myself in the shoes of a person in that situation, like the desire and the drive to be better. So how cool that we have those resources that can meet them halfway.

SPEAKER_02 23:20

Exactly. And and one of the things that people often are worried about is becoming so exposed when they have to release those very personal and private details. And in our educational setting, we have statutes that govern what we can talk about after you tell us something. And the same governing policies that fall within the medical world when you talk to your doctor about something that's very personal to you, they can't go disclose it. The same thing happens when people talk to Angelica and I. So this is the time where it's okay to be vulnerable because our job here is to think about all the different avenues that we can navigate to get you the maximum opportunity that you can to be successful with your life.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

Oh, I love that. I I don't I couldn't think of a better way to wrap up than with that very sentence. I have linked everything, all the resources that we've talked about in the show notes so that parents and students alike can get in touch with you. Yeah. So thank you all so much for doing this. This has been fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 24:10

We appreciate you having us and thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 24:14

Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share. Voices United in Education is a production of Escambie County Public Schools.